A recent exhibition at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia, showcased the work of neo-Baroque painter Ray Donley. The title of the exhibition, “The Art of Los Bien Perdidos,” refers to Donley’s dramatis personae of “solitary itinerants,” lost ones or “perdidos,” in Spanish. The painter, who holds two degrees in art history, works in an idiom that reflects his admiration for the Dutch and Spanish tenebrists. The compositional formula for these “fictional portraits” typically focuses on a single figure in vaguely period dress, who emerges from a bituminous gloom that is both richly painterly and psychologically fraught. Because period details are kept to a minimum, with no archaeological stagecraft, the emphasis is on the psychic isolation of the individual. Donley claims to have no interest in “anachronisms for their own sake,” preferring to explore “a world that is idiosyncratic, personal and capable of transcending time and space.” In the simplest of these paintings, The Encounter (2008), enveloping shadows make it difficult to read the face of the subject, even though he crowds the picture-space in tight close-up. Does this sinister obscurity signal the unknowableness of the past or modernist alienation? The Sorcerer (2008) is a more recognizable character, with a streak of white ruffled collar and the shape of his magician’s hat discernable. The theatrical lighting on his face and on his rhetorically conjuring hands has a tinge of Caravaggio.
The self-conscious drama of the pose has a darkly playful, almost goth sensibility. It is easy to see why the surrealist filmmaker David Lynch is one of Donley’s collectors.
 

“Eye on the Environment,” at the Sherry French Gallery in New York City this spring, explored the philosophical underpinnings of the landscape genre. The motto for the exhibition was taken from a Kenyan proverb: “Treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your parents. It was lent to you by your children.” In the nineteenth century, Romantic writers and visual artists confronted a number of contemporary issues, including the Industrial Revolution’s threats to the environment and population shifts that separated a large portion of the citizenry from rural life. Their celebration of nature was a subtle response that emphasized the resilience as well as the fragility of the living world. The traditionalist landscapists at the Sherry French show take a similar approach, balancing today’s concerns about the ecosystem with formal imperatives of harmonious composition. Peter Polites looks at the Tybee Island marshes in a seasonal quartet of images, all dated 2007. The brackish coastal waters east of Savannah serve an important ecological function, as purifiers and anything-but-stagnant sources of life. From simple elements—spartina grass, sky, mirrored pools and mud banks—Polites creates deceptively serene images that use the flatness of the horizon as a symbol of equilibrium. Tybee Road Marsh: Spring Tide, in shades of brown and yellow-green, uses texture to suggest wind moving through grass. In Tybee Road: Summer Squall Front, clouds pile up overhead as sharp sunlight turns the grass bright green. Tybee Road Marsh: Fall Breezes contrasts a swath of golden grass with the milkiness of the overcast sky. In Tybee Road Marsh: Winter Sky Break, the grass is a deep, velvety brown, while sky and water dissolve into a mass of silvery light. Together, the set demonstrates the value of attentive observation.

How we think about nature makes a big difference to how we make art. Consider how ancient Greek polytheism led to a profusion of visual images, while ancient Hebrew monotheism led to a worship of the word instead. Or we could reflect on how medieval transcendental theology gave us paintings in which the figures in the background—the Virgin Mary, the risen Christ, God the Father, the saints—are larger than the sinners, patrons and other mortals in the foreground; while the Renaissance theology of God’s presence within us and within nature gave us visual perspective, in which close objects are large and distant ones small. A geocentric universe implies one kind of art; a heliocentric one, another; a centerless universe, yet a third.
 

The San Francisco-based painter Kim Cogan (b. 1977 in Korea) had his first solo exhibition in New York City this spring, at Gallery Henoch. Cogan focuses, for the most part, on the small-scale intimacies of urban neighborhoods. Even when he takes the wide view, offbeat subjects trump icons. The epic sweep of Queensboro Bridge (2008) is less interesting than the night-time industrial roofscape Kentile Floors (2008), with the smudgy black letters of the sign floating like an apparition against the light-polluted sky. Rooftop views are a way of gaining distance, of letting buildings resolve themselves into geometric forms. “I’m always trying to balance abstraction and realism,” remarks Cogan, who cites Richard Diebenkorn as one of his inspirations. He also admires the work of contemporary Spanish realist Antonio López García and Edward Hopper. Hopper’s existential sidewalks are clearly a model for Cogan’s corner store paintings La Bonita Bakery and St. Michael Grocery (both 2008). Cogan’s streets are depopulated, adding to the eerie isolation of these artificially lit outposts. He forces the perspective so that the non-descript low-rises heave up like the Flatiron Building and the side streets hurtle off into darkness at expressionist angles. In another night scene, End of the Alley (2008), a long vantage point makes the perspective lines of the encroaching buildings shoot off in Caligari-esque diagonals. A rosy-red fire escape, lit from below, is another disorienting feature.
 

The still lifes by Stephen Tanis (b. 1945), recently on view at Jane Haslem Gallery in Washington, D.C., follow a fairly restricted formula: a cluster of natural objects seen in tight close-up against a neutral background, with the table edge neatly paralleling the lower edge of the canvas. Despite the shallowness of the display space, the illusion of three-dimensionally is persuasive, and forms have a sculptural presence. Tanis uses shadows adeptly to further the illusion. In Shells (2006), two curvaceous specimens— one large and spiky, the other a tight little spiral— are propped up against a sky-blue backdrop. Given the color choices and eccentric forms, one strategy would be to flatten out the composition into flat, rococo shapes; here the artist uses elongated shadows to anchor the shells realistically in mimetic space. Exotic shells have an alien presence, but Tanis brings the same intense focus to less flamboyant subjects. Garlic (2006) lays out a row of papery bulbs on a marble surface, in front of an old metal implement with a patina as mottled as the purplish background. The crinkly texture of the garlic has a different feel than the calcified bone of the shells.
 

The premier solo exhibition from Michael Klein, at Arcadia Fine Arts in New York City this spring, was an auspicious debut. The 27-year-old painter trained at academic ateliers in his native Minnesota before apprenticing with Jacob Collins. Klein’s paintings, divided into figure studies and still lifes, demonstrate both meticulous craftsmanship and considerable individual personality. The somber, limited color palette he has chosen to explore yields interesting results. White is the star in two still lifes, reflecting a nineteenth-century preoccupation from Whistler’s “White Girls” to Impressionist snowscapes. In Mementoes (all works 2007), a white throw tumbles across a dusty brown chest of drawers; the textural distinction between silky fabric and plush fur is deftly rendered. The arrangement of elements in Floral Interior is more complex: in a lumber-strewn corner of a room sits an old-fashioned, whitewashed treadle sewing machine, with decorative curves and a chipped surface, topped by a clear vase full of white chrysanthemums. White plays an important supporting role in one of the figure studies, Recuerdos. A melancholy young woman, wrapped in a black coat with a brown fur collar, sits in a dull green armchair. The dark figure is set off by the paneled white walls of the interior behind her—a sort of cameo in reverse—and by a spray of white flowers leaning in from out of frame, a touch that again suggests Whistler. In all three paintings, Klein plays off the freshness of the white against matte, weathered darks in surprisingly zesty ways.

We need a contemporary dialogue with classical sources, if we are going to improve higher education in America. The careful study of the liberal arts tradition can heighten the ability of painters and sculptors to create not just good art, but truly beautiful and lasting art; contemplation of beauty can also renew the liberal arts tradition itself. We need a national model for a new form of education America has not yet achieved, but which Renaissance Italy did: a sustained dialogue between the liberal arts and the fine arts. Research and writing should be meaningful not just to scholars, but also to all citizens. We can improve not only our schools, but our own lives, by rediscovering the core values of the liberal arts tradition, and the best way to rediscover these values is to study them at their point of origin in classical antiquity.

Running concurrently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Antonio López García,” is the first retrospective at an American museum for this important artist. The exhibition of forty-five paintings, drawings and sculptures includes nine works from the museum’s own collection, representing a serious commitment to a school too little known in the United States. While contemporary Spanish realists display considerable stylistic diversity, they share a taste for naturalism, patient craftsmanship and respect for humble subjects—characteristics of the legacy of Velázquez and Ribera. López (b. 1936) entered the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid at age 13 and, as a young artist, investigated surrealism, or the version of it described as magic realism. Atocha (1964) retains an element of enigmatic narrative, juxtaposing a nude, copulating couple with a detailed view of the area around Madrid’s railway station. López’s cityscapes can take months or even years to complete. South Madrid (1965–85) became a long-term project, evolving over two decades as the artist meticulously recorded the changing city from his chosen vantage point. His oil paintings do not have the rich surfaces and velvety chiaroscuro of the old masters. Matte surfaces and diffuse, filtered light signal López’s awareness of modernism. New Refrigerator (1991–94) is an unmistakably late-twentieth- century work. The open door of the appliance reveals a consumer-society cornucopia, and the heavy form seems to float against a cloudy, almost abstract space. The most striking work is Sink and Mirror (1967), a vertiginous tight shot down into a bathroom sink. A glass shelf of toiletries functions as a suspended altar and displaced portrait of the absent resident. The pearly daylight, from an unseen source, softly illuminates everyday paraphernalia. López’s pencil drawing of his oldest daughter at the age of 10, María (1972), has a similar gentle light. The child’s face and hands are delicately etched against the dense mass of her dark coat. The accompanying catalogue, Antonio López García, includes an essay by Cheryl Brutran and entries by Miguel Fernandez-Cid.

The poet Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), an acclaimed practitioner of the international Baroque style—most familiar in the English-speaking world through the Metaphysical poetry of John Donne and Richard Crashaw—wrote a sonnet eulogizing El Greco (1541–1614), praising the painter for “the softest brush/Ever to give spirit to wood, life to linen.”¹ The young Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) painted a portrait of the poet in 1622. Luis de Góngora y Argote is an austere composition in brown and black; a narrow white collar draws attention to the strong, intelligent if not particularly attractive face. The portrait originally included a laurel wreath, a conventional attribute for an illustrious writer. Velázquez painted it out, a gesture that fits our idea of a forward-thinking, naturalistic artist. We think of Velázquez as a more modern painter than El Greco, an art historical view epitomized by the Metropolitan Museum’s 2003 blockbuster exhibition “Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Art.” El Greco likely received his first artistic training in a monastery on his native Crete, where the Byzantine style lingered. Cretan artists were known for their facility in shifting between manners, alla bizantina or alla veneziana.² El Greco traveled to Venice to work in Titian’s studio and absorb the lessons of Tintoretto and Veronese, then went to Rome soon after the death of Michelangelo, when Mannerism was becoming the dominant style. But El Greco found a spiritual home in Toledo, Spain, immortalized in his fluid, expressionistic View of Toledo (1600).